Inverting sampled ADSL traffic

On the basis of a reference model for ADSL traffic on an IP backbone link, established in an earlier study, we show that it is possible to infer the characteristics of long flows by performing a deterministic 1/N packet sampling. By using the fact that the number of active long flows can be represented by means of the number of customers in an M/G/∞ queue with Weibullian service times, we derive some probabilistic properties of the sampled data. These properties are then used to infer the characteristics of the original flows. The method is illustrated by considering an actual traffic trace captured in the France Telecom IP backbone network. Experimental data show that the method proves quite efficient.